William Hjortsberg: 6 books

“Brautigan’s life unfolds as a tragicomedy, and the book vividly evokes the heady 1960s and 1970s, especially in the Bay Area.” —The San Francisco Chronicle Confident and robust, Jubilee Hitchhiker is an comprehensive biography of late novelist and poet Richard Brautigan, author of...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini team up to search for a literary-minded killer It is 1923 and a beautiful young woman has just been found outside a tenement, bones crushed, head ripped from her shoulders. A few stories above, her squalid apartment has been ransacked, and twenty-dollar...

Edgar Award Finalist: The hunt for a vanished singer leads a detective into the depths of the occult in this “terrific” novel (Stephen King).   Big-band frontman Johnny Favorite was singing for the troops when a Luftwaffe fighter squadron strafed the bandstand, killing the crowd and leaving...

Unrest simmers in a dystopian future where disembodied brains are kept alive in tanks, waiting to earn a new body At twelve years old, Skeets Kalbfleischer is returning from a ski vacation when a lightning strike knocks his plane out of the sky, killing everyone else on board. Although his...

In postapocalyptic America, a solitary man crafts the world’s latest form of escapism: dreams For eighty-five years, Par Sondak has crafted dreams. Each night he retires, probes attached to his sleeping body, and builds magnificent worlds for the people of the City to enjoy. His dreams have...

The life of an American hippie in Mexico is upended by a gang of ex-cons in this thriller full of “wild surprises” (Carl Hiaasen). All Tod remembers when he wakes up next to a dead prostitute is that he had his first shot of heroin the night before. He and his wife, Linda, were partying...